context switch

Good Intentions/2

gtk+: I’ve been working again on the RecentManager and in trunk you’ll see some new stuff, namely:

• use GIO to determine the MIME type of a URI, on every platform supported
• use the file monitoring API to avoid polling the storage file
• add a GtkSettings property for clamping the recently used resources list to a 30 days limit

more stuff I’d like to add is:

• small parser changes to GBookmarkFile, to reflect changes in the spec
• bulk addition, for applications storing multiple items when quitting
• new API needed to follow the usability review in bug 349541
• moving the RecentItem icon code to GIO, and add API to extract the thumbnail

twitter: I’ve been using Twitter a lot in the past two weeks; it’s nice, it makes it easier to copy and paste a quote or a thought, and the 160 characters limit is an interesting challenge. As it’s been ages since I last wrote an application¹, I decided to start writing a Twitter reader/writer — using GTK+, Clutter and Tidy; without much thinking, I opened gvim and started writing code in C² — so, the obvious thing that happened was that I ended up writing a library yet again in order to use Twitter’s web API. luckily for me, libsoup has now a really nice API to work with; all you need is GET and POST to their RESTful API, retrieve the result, parse it through JSON-GLib, hide everything inside a new GObject and you have a wrapper around a web service. the application, you say? oh, I was sure I forgot something. well, it’s coming along — it just needs some work still.

1. lately all I’ve been doing was writing libraries [↩]
2. hey, that’s what I do for a living, it’s hard to switch off; plus, I could reuse some of the platform libraries [↩]

Rhyme the rhyme well

Jason, it’s not just the canvas: writing a simple 2D canvas is trivial — that’s why a lot of applications end up writing their own homegrown one.

The hard bits are the animation framework, the event handling and down to the integration with the existing platform. A generic canvas is hard, and you probably don’t want it to be developed inside gtk+ (not even for 3.0) — just like Cairo is not developed inside gtk+ but supersedes part of gtk+’s API.

As for 3D acceleration — I’m obviously biased here, so everyone should take what I write with a graintruckload of salt — but I maintain my view that if GNOME (and Linux) started heavily pushing towards more support for OpenGL, then we could get more market share¹, more visibility and thus more leverage to make the currently closed source drivers more open. Intel understood this; AMD is now getting it; I’m pretty sure nVidia will — or they will be simply pushed into irrelevance by the open drivers developed by the community². Let’s face it: other platforms and toolkits are pushing heavily on hardware accelerated 3D effects.

Let’s start aggressively work to get the platform into the XXI century.

update@2008-10-11T12:21+0100 — just as a sidenote: if you have a good CPU, Mesa and software rendering, Clutter will work. It won’t be fast for some operations (like scaling and, possibly, rotating), but in that case you should probably start contributing to Mesa to make it fast (there’s a lot of room for improvement).

1. think Compiz, and how many more users it brought home just with a spinning cube [↩]
2. unless you are a gamer, and need the very best card as soon as it’s out just to play Crisis [↩]

Meet the Farce

comedy gold or bad acid trip?

personally, epic fail

kudos to pgc

Helm, set a course… for love

a GNOME cruise? I already have the theme song…

GNOME-Love Boat, love exciting and new,
Come aboard, we're expecting you.

The GNOME-Love Boat soon will be making another release,
The GNOME-Love Boat promises something for everyone.

Set a course for adventure,
Your box's on a new romance.

And GNOME-Love
Won't hurt anymore,
It's an open source,
On a userfriendly shore.

it's GNOME-Love
Welcome aboard it's GNOME-love

Small Print

Could someone please tell me why notification-daemon holds ~51000 windows after two days of uptime?

51700 windows? Really?

Now, I accept the idea that maybe xrestop is lying (and mallum on my back is ready to hit me) but this sounds like a huge leak somewhere.

Please, someone tell me this is a known bug in Ubuntu Feisty and that Gutsy is already fixed.